Why is health care so expensive? – Part 2 – Marion Mass, MD
Marion Mass MD returns for Part 2 of our series on healthcare economics, and explores why health care costs are rising faster than college tuition. In this episode, Dr. Mass focuses on GPO’s and PBM’s. Everyone needs to know what these two acronyms mean, as they are responsible for adding $200 Billion to Americans’ health care bills each year.
Kickbacks are illegal in just about every industry except healthcare. GPO’s and PBM’s are integrating vertically and horizontally and most medicine and hospital equipment sold in the US goes through just a handful of GPO’s and PBM’s.
4 GPO’s now control 90% of all the hospital and nursing home supplies and 3 PBM’s control 85% of all prescription drugs.
Marion Mass, MD, is a practicing physician, a patient advocate, and a founding member of the PPA (Practicing Physicians of America), explains the shocking and secretive world of Pharmacy Benefit Managers (PBM’s) and Group Puchasing Organizations (GPO’s) and follows the money to uncover the truth behind rising health care costs.
Below is the content Dr. Mass mentions in the podcast.
If you haven’t listened to Part 1 of our discussion with Dr. Mass, you need to check it out by following this link.
Dr. Mass is very active politically, and is the vice chair of Practicing Physicians of America (PPA), a non-profit group dedicated to improving the doctor-patient relationship through confronting laws and regulations that limits the ability of physicians to serve their patients.
Last year, Dr. Mass co authored the Free2Care White paper which detailed how to improve access and lower costs to patients by reducing waste with specific legislative solutions.” You can read the paper here: http://free2care.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Free2care.pdf
Dr. Mass is drawing attention to pg 41 (Appendix B) of the free2care.org white paper shown above. That is the bill Dr. Mass is asking everyone to share with their lawmaker to draw attention to the crisis and its simple solution. End legal kickbacks in the healthcare industry.
You can learn more about Dr. Mass’ efforts to challenge the status quo by visiting the sites below:
Practicing Physicians of America, co-founder https://practicingphysician.org/ Facebook: @PPAofUSA
Bucks County Health Improvement Partnership, board: https://www.bchip.org/
Bucks County Courier Times, Doylestown Intel, editorial Board: https://www.buckscountycouriertimes.com/
